You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. Canonical is building Mir to replace X so that it can be used in it's mobile devices. They are not putting effort into Wayland because it is licensed as MIT where Mir will be GPLv3. This is to safeguard Ubuntu mobile devices. XMir is required just as XWayland is required to bridge the transition gap. I'm not advocating Mir in any way but facts are facts.

I just read this whole blog post and it was brilliant! Totally makes sense.

I agree. Why not created a new X12 protocol? X11 without all the cruft that is no longer needed plus all the new things that are desirable?

FINALLY someone who actually likes the semantic desktop. Maybe it's because none of my computers are very old but I've never had performance issues (except maybe the first couple of releases) and once you start to use it, you will wonder what you did without it!

Sounds exactly like Debian Stable

Good point

The R&D team prefer to use their money on say...R&D?

Can you recommend one?

Same here. I have to use Windows at work and I'm on the desktop 99% of the time. I can't really see the benefit of Windows 8 over 7 at the moment though so I'm considering going back.

Only need to name one. Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup.

Like I said, this isn't math. They could have just as well used a hyphen instead of a period (period, not decimal).

This isn't math, it's software development. We all know exactly what it means.

In my organisation we back up to disk nightly. Disk is then backed up to tape (also nightly) and tapes are taken to off-site storage for disaster recovery every day. Disk back ups are kept for 4 weeks. Daily tapes are also kept for 4 weeks but end of month tapes are kept for 7 years.

Samba is not that bad. In fact in my NAS, I have to use samba instead of NFS because it doesn't work well with ZFS on FreeBSD. I know this is a little off topic but it also handles ACLs and user access much better than NFS.

Although true, it's really only a problem because of OEM lock in. If there were more options to choose from when purchasing a new PC then the monopoly no longer exists and people would just choose not to have that crap installed on their computer. The problem is most people don't know any better and think the only two computers in the world are Macs which come with OS X and PC which is Windows. If you think about it, Microsoft can do whatever the hell they want with their OS. It's the vendor lock in that's the problem.